The Switch

58

On the front passenger’s seat of the rented Nissan was the backpack stuffed with the possibly bugged shoes and belt, along with the burner he assumed had been tampered with, and the GPS unit, and a pair of hunting binoculars.

He took 93 North out of the city, the lower deck of the Tobin Bridge over the Mystic River, steel girders crisscrossing all around.

By the time he got to Route 16 West, he still hadn’t seen any vehicle appearing to follow him. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t happening. Between the burner phone, the shoes, and the belt, all of which the NSA had taken away for a while, there had to be a GPS tracker in something. He was just guessing, of course, but he felt reasonably sure about it. They were probably following him in some government building somewhere by watching a pulsing, moving dot on a computer screen.

Then he took Route 2, west through the Boston suburbs, then a smaller road south for a few miles, and another, until he came to the town of Lincoln. He drove down a narrow road for a little over a mile until he reached an old cemetery. The headstones here, which dated to the eighteenth century, were thin and worn and close together. Around the graveyard was a low split-rail fence. He parked at the side of the road and waited for a couple of cars to pass. None of them slowed or stopped or did anything remotely suspicious.

If he were being followed, he’d scrap his planned getaway, as simple as that. He’d figure something else out. But there didn’t seem to be anyone in the vicinity watching him, or driving past repeatedly, or staying too close behind him on the road.

That just confirmed his theory. They didn’t need to be close by. They didn’t need to tail him.

He took out the possibly compromised burner phone, switched it on, and while it came to life and played its little start-up ditty, he searched his pockets for a scrap of paper until he found it. On it was the phone number of the burner he’d given Carl.

Somewhere, in a top secret government office, on a map display on some impossibly powerful computer, a flashing dot would wink on. He was sure of it.

“Ted,” he said. “It’s Tanner.”

“It’s okay to use our real names?”

“As long as we’re talking on burner phones, yes,” Tanner said. “Don’t call me on your regular mobile phone or your landline. Don’t e-mail me. Any of these ways, they could be listening in.”

“My phones?”

“They probably have you under surveillance because you’re someone I e-mail often. Because you’re a friend. And you really are, by the way.”

“Thanks, Tanner,” Carl said. “I guess.”

He knew he was to answer to the name Ted. It didn’t require any acting talent, fortunately. Carl Unsworth wasn’t much of an actor. This way, Carl wouldn’t be implicated, dragged into this trouble.

“Ted, I’m in Lincoln, on my way to the woods to dig up the laptop. I need you to meet me out here so I can hand it over to you. You know how to get to the spot, right?”

“I got it, I got it.”

“See you soon.”

He slipped the car key under the front seat, grabbed the backpack, and got out. He hefted it over one shoulder and started off. A narrow dirt path alongside the graveyard fence led straight into a forest.

He looked around and then strode quickly along the dirt path into the dense pine woods. After a few minutes he took out the GPS unit and located himself, a little blue arrow on the map display.

The GPS had been Carl’s idea. He was a geocacher, which was apparently a hobby involving a search for hidden things using GPS. Something like that.

Then he set off again. Once, he heard the snap of a twig and turned swiftly, alarmed, only to realize it was his own doing. He was still not being physically followed, as far as he knew.

Whose woods these were, Tanner had no idea. But as a kid he and his friends had hiked here often. He knew where he was going. Once, on a break from college, he and his best friend, whose parents both taught at Harvard, had gotten lost in this forest. Not far from here, his friend’s dad had told them, Henry David Thoreau used to hike and then write about it in his journals.

The way was twisty at first, but soon it yielded to a clearing. A few of the trees were marked on their tall bald trunks with yellow blazes that had been painted and repainted over the years. This was the trailhead.

Consulting the GPS occasionally, he followed the trail for a while; in places it became narrow and choked. From time to time he peered back the way he’d come. After about ten minutes, the light gradually changed, as the trees turned from mostly pine to hemlock. For more than an acre, the hemlock trees had crowded out all competing species, creating a tight, dim forest. Soft mottled light filtered through the dense canopy.

He was close. The location dot was just about an inch away from the destination dot.

He proceeded west a few hundred feet, out of the hemlock canopy and back into the sparser pine forest, until he came upon an area that just looked right. The GPS unit confirmed he was in the right place. A stand of pine trees ringed a bare spot about ten feet in diameter. Here there was the stump of a dead tree, vibrant with green moss. Next to it the earth looked disturbed, as if someone had been digging.

He looked up and saw the tree directly north of the stump. His friend Scott had chosen well. It was a cedar, tall and conical, dense with needles.

He looked around and then came closer until he was standing just a few feet from the cedar, and then he saw the tiny red light of the small video camera nestled in a crook of the tree. The camera was barely visible. But its red light might attract scrutiny. He’d asked Scott to cover the light with a piece of electrician’s tape, but he’d clearly forgotten.

Well, by the time it was noticed, it would be too late.

The camera would record the faces of the NSA team as they approached and attempted to dig up the laptop. It would simultaneously stream the video, and Scott would record it. Was it a violation of the NSA’s charter for a clandestine operations team to be operating within the country? Tanner wasn’t sure, but he knew negotiating, and he knew he’d have something that Earle would respect. It was blackmail, plain and simple. But what was the expression the Ukrainian financier used? You kill my dog, I kill your cat? That video was the sort of thing that could prompt Senate hearings. It would be a damaging revelation. The NSA would not want that video out.

Now he dropped the backpack and the phone on the ground, against the tree stump. He hung the binoculars around his neck.

The flashing dot on that computer map on a monitor in a government office — as he imagined it — would stop moving. Which would be as expected: Tanner was digging, they’d think.

But by placing a call on the probably cloned or bugged cell phone, Tanner had just given them a reason to come out and grab him again.

They would want to intercept him before he handed off the laptop to his friend.

Now he had to move.

The NSA would be scrambling to send a capture team out to where he was.

He had no idea how quickly they could move, but now that he’d turned on the phone, he had to get as far away as he could. The rental car was out: they’d know, the moment his credit card was charged, the make and model and license plate number. They’d be on the lookout for it.

No, he had to move, at first on foot, and then — what? — maybe he could hop on the commuter rail, the train that stopped in Lincoln town center. You could pay in cash once you boarded.

He had enough cash on him.

He kept going through the woods, dead leaves rustling underfoot. He thought he heard something, a distant noise, and he looked behind.

For a moment he thought that he’d seen something moving far off, a shape, maybe a human figure. Then he decided it had been only a trick of the light.

After all, they could not possibly have located him that quickly. Since they didn’t seem to be following him in person, it would take them some decent amount of time — whether that meant fifteen minutes or an hour — to get out to where he was from wherever they were monitoring him.

He put the binoculars up to his eyes and focused. There was something moving in the woods, though all he could see was moving shadows. It was too far away, through too much underbrush.

Surely it had nothing to do with him.

But if it did.

He walked west, juking left and right. He could not get up any speed here; the obstacles in his way were too many. So he zigzagged for a few hundred feet.

Not too far away was a farm, he recalled, neighboring the forest. He remembered a cornfield. That offered possibilities. You could hide in a cornfield.

But where was it?

He passed a small, dank pond scabbed over with lily pads, and he remembered vaguely that they’d once tried to swim in it, one summer, and were put off by the sludgy bottom and the thick tangle of plant growth beneath the surface. Now he was relying on distant memory. Where was the cornfield?

Just up ahead he noticed some two-by-fours nailed to the trunk of an old oak. He recognized it at once as a deer stand, used by deer hunters. The two-by-fours were actually nailed between the oak and a neighboring pine tree in a ladder formation. The boards went up easily forty or fifty feet. Hunters climbed up the tree and put something like a milk crate high up in the tree to use as a seat. Up there they could see deer coming from far away.

He climbed the makeshift ladder. The nails had been sunk in deep; the boards held fast. He ached all over, especially his lower back, where he’d been hurt in the struggle with Earle’s men. In a minute he was probably fifty feet off the ground and could see the full swath of forest spread out before him. Nestled in the tree, behind foliage, he wasn’t visible.

He saw shadows moving through the woods. Several human figures, he was now certain. This wasn’t a group of friends enjoying a hike. They were swarming in a rhythmic, coordinated cadence. Only a few minutes away, he calculated, at the rate they were going. Ahead of schedule.

It was them. It had to be.

His heart began to thud. Off to the west he saw the forest give way to lawns and houses. That was where the old cornfield used to be, now a suburban neighborhood.

He hustled down the ladder, scraping his arm against a nail that was sticking out of the tree, and raced through the woods due west, toward the neighborhood.

He plunged into a tight cluster of trees and immediately tripped on a dead log.

Scrambling to his feet — chagrined at losing a precious few seconds — he bounded through the woods as fast as he could, weaving among the trees, zigzagging back and forth.

Soon he reached an open field, a lawn he’d seen from the deer stand, and he raced across it to a paved road and then out to a heavily trafficked street, and there, standing on the narrow shoulder of the road, he stuck out his thumb to hitch a ride.